"When thatgamecompany began making Flower, they weren't sure what they were going to end up with," opened Diamante, who was winner of best interactive audio at the Game Audio Network Guild awards for his work. "One of the only anchor points that [designer] Jenova Chen had was that he knew he wanted to make a game with a strong narrative; he wasn't much of a story writer, but he knew he wanted that traditional three act structure. Flower ended up without dialogue or characters, but it could still tell a narrative due to the things you have in games, such as level design, art direction and audio. "
As a freelance composer, Diamante stressed the importance of the decision to be integrated into the team as early as possible.
"I was brought in extremely early, from the pre-production phase," he said. "It makes for a really interesting relationship. I was there for two years; it's unusual to have an audio designer work as closely with the game designers like that."
Not that being on-board from such an early stage made things easy—Diamante noted that at the pre-production phase Flower "wasn't even a flying game".
"Sometimes it was a golfing game, sometimes it was about rolling seeds; they weren't sure what the mechanics were, and I was there trying to do my best writing music for what they were working on at the time."
"The game mechanics were always in flux," he continued, "which could be very difficult, because we'd be scoring particular actions, and one day we'd need a rolling sound, and the next we wouldn't."
Flower's score is an interactive system of layers, Diamante explained, but not the way interactive game audio has traditionally been organized. "I didn't want the layers to begin as this thin piece of music that thickens up by the end. I wanted it to be that you hear a different piece of music; that you have a different perspective on it. I was trying to write these layers with a lot of independence, so if by the time you hear the fourth layer you're hearing a clarinet as the lead, you might hear a violin in the lead by the eight layer, and the clarinet is a counter melody to it. It was an arbitrary task to give myself but it was fun!"
In addition, the entire soundtrack was composed in D Major. "This was a conscious decision," Diamante said. "Beethoven talks of how the key is the key of royalty, I think it really did a good job of lending a petal swarm an air of majesty."
Flower was created (unusually) in the order of the levels, and Diamante stated that by the time they reached level two he started to make "some demands" of the programming team. "I needed the game to have an awareness of the music structure. I read a book on jazz improvisation by Shelton Berg that refers to a 'goal-note' - people talk of jazz improvisation as this wacky freeform thing, but he actually found a discrete way that someone 'jazzes'. I found a way to script this into the music that plays when you hit a flower—working out what note to play after the first random note."
"it's actually pretty cool," he laughed, "you can get some amazingly interesting melodies, one time I was in the office playing and the melody evolved into Close Encounters of the Third Kind!"
Diamante also crafted the score to have an overall narrative arc. "For my first game I was kind of ambitious; I wanted the score to be a microcosm of the progression of music. The first level starts very classical, by the middle of the game you are in the late-classical, romantic period, and by the end of the game there's a neo-romantic, almost modern sound."
To help foster this audio narrative, Diamante noted he also made demands of the designers, influencing on the spacing of flowers in the game world to ensure they would "compliment the music the best".
"I think we're going to see more games like Flower, and more game development processes like the one that made Flower," concluded Diamante. "You can't get hung up on if the process is traditional or not, sometimes you just have to go with the flow and believe in your heart that what you are making is really awesome."